If it’s a joke, it’s continued with broken English inside the game. Maybe it’s one of those things where “genuinely awful” and “parody” are hard to distinguish.
It’s a bit like playing poker - you get a sense of what your strength is relative to the potential strength of the encounters (based on the level of the area, but the encounters are random), and the risk / reward is based on if you think you can win the hardest possible encounter to snowball the hardest without dying. Dying is a huge deal, because as you noticed you lose 3 of your 30 turns (plus the turn you spent on the fight), which might mean you can’t get very far. But proper snowballing can reward you by progressing a lot further into the map than you might otherwise. There’s strategy to the items you have - do you stack XP gain, or attack, or something else? There’s areas that have mobs at levels over 50,000, and it sounds like you can get there in under 30 turns. Oh, there’s also bosses that give you turns back - so being able to mow down bosses efficiently and move in particular paths given the map and the equipment you have changes at least a little every game as you get stronger. There are strategies you can run through the map to accomplish - do you want to get as far as you can to try and farm a boss for one of the more powerful items that only drop from that boss, or do you want to try and max your gold income by leveling Luck and gimping your combat stats?
The game almost reminds me of the overhead map from HOMM, which was just set set of roadblocks that you wanted to mow down in the proper order as fast as you could.
I guess if you expected the game to be about how to micro manage actions within the battles, then it’s a disappointment, but that’s not what the game’s about. I’d argue that the “root gameplay” isn’t the actual fight, but the battles that you pick. That said, the 30 turns means that you’re going to see some of the same content repeatedly…but that’s a feature, not a bug.
It sounds a little bit like Half Minute Hero, but more turn based.
There’s nothing turn-based about it. The “turns” he’s referring to are battles. You wander around until something jumps you. That’s real time. The fight goes by rapidly and automatically, that’s real time. You get 30 battles and the game is over.
It bored me silly, since there were no meaningful decisions that I could see.
Gus, it’s not real time. If you don’t move, nothing happens and the countdown to the next fight doesn’t increase. You can not like the game, and that’s fine, but it’s like you formed your opinion off playing for a few minutes at best and you don’t grasp even the most basic parts of the mechanics.
I understand that. You think I don’t understand the mechanics because we’re quibbling over terms. “You don’t fight if you don’t move” doesn’t make it remotely turn based, but it’s an unimportant distinction.
It’s true I only gave it a few minutes. That’s all it deserves. You wander around a map whose sole purpose is to determine how big the number is for your next fight. When you do fight, it’s a matter of comparing your number to your opponent’s number. If there’s any subtlety to it, it’s impossible to tell because the mechanics are hidden and the battles run rapidly without any player intervention. So there’s no real sense of strategy in increasing your numbers.
At root, it’s a matter of increasing your number while aimlessly walking back and forth in a zone that should yield numbers smaller than yours. It’s Progress Quest, only slightly less automated. Slightly.
That does make it turn based though. Old-style rogue likes are turn based, thigns happen every time you move, but nothing happens when you don’t. time passing is based on you taking a turn, that’s what turn based is. odd that you don’t see that.
magnet
2828
If there were no real skill involved, then Gus and espressojim should have roughly comparable scores in their last few games. I suspect espressojim actually has much higher scores.
I’ve played Inflation RPG a few times myself, and it’s basically the logical culmination of the trend popularized by Dungeon Raid and Puzzle Quest: take a minigame and add a min-max RPG metagame.
If it works for orb matching then it can work for slot machines. And if it works for slot machines, then it can work even with no minigame at all.
I’ve been able to crack getting into the 2nd set of “maps”, where a combination of the right items and the right run path gets me through the first 4 bosses pretty quickly. It’s interesting though that I make almost no $$$ on those runs, so I can get further, but don’t earn enough money to get an item breakpoint by purchasing that item, but I’ve farmed one or two nice items from the next set of bosses. I have a completely different set up that yields 0.5-1.2M gold per run, which lets me farm up some new items to start with. The game might not be for everyone, but it tickles my min/max/speedrun buttons.
Grifman
2830
Hitman GO is free now as the IGN game it the month.
Hitman Go may not be my cup of tea - I’m not into straight puzzle games - but it’s very well polished, and if it is your genre, it looks like an excellent example.
Yes, I’m not a puzzle gamer at all, but Hitman Go was worth a try for free. A brilliant boardgame aesthetic and an original type of puzzle. I hit a certain point (the end of the first game box) where I could not solve the map and was out of free hints. That ended it for me, but still great fun.
A very good well designed Aces Of The Deep / Silent Hunter sub game for iOS and Android - http://panicensuessoftware.com/CrashDive/index.html
Back to the previous page, I tried Inflation RPG. The design seems interesting, but the developer doesn’t seem to be very good at the program side of things; I highly doubt anything going on in this seemingly lightweight game justifies the constant crashes on my fourth-gen iPod touch.
Goat Simulator is out for iOS. I never tried it on the PC. Is it workable with touchscreen controls?
magnet
2838
Galaxy Trucker, based on the boardgame by Vlaada Chvatil, is out now for iPad.
Mysterio
2839
Yeah, Owen’s been raving about it for the last couple of weeks.
